The Lives And Times of Speed Runners

1up.com has a feature looking into the high stress world of game speed running. Primarily a history of the sport, they start with Doom and Super Mario Bros. and walk us forward to sequence breaking runs through Metroid Prime. From the article: "While there are plenty of real-world time-based challenges, speed running stands apart thanks to its virtual nature. You'll never tune in to a track meet and see competitors taking shortcuts across the grass, but that's essentially the modus operandi of video game speed runners. Similarly, you'll never see athletes exploiting flaws in reality to jump further or to warp themselves ahead in the race. Again, that's something that can only be done via video games. While speed running has been acquiring a serious head of steam over the last few years, its origins can be traced back to one game in particular: id Software's late 1993 bombshell of an FPS, Doom. "

Comments

ermm .. speedrunning came before DOOM ..

[torpor]

.. before Wolfenstein (saw it for that a few times), before Duke Nukem (non-3D), even before Jet Set Willy.

Pacman had speed runners. Pitfall too. Speed running is at least as old as the 70's.

Maybe 'in the modern context of video games', where modern = 'anything since 1990', speed-running 'can be traced' to DOOM, but its an old sport.

speed running is what you did in the 70's when you already 'beat the game' a few times, and you had nothing else to play ..

Re:Fun to watch

[ALeavitt]

Remember - most (if not all) of the videos on Bisqwit's site are time attacks, not speed runs. There's an important difference. Time attacks are recorded on emulators with slow motion, save states, and other techniques to make recording an absolutely perfect game possible. When the movie is played back at full speed in one segment it looks like an amazing playthrough. Speed runs are "pure" runs through games without hacks. That makes them that much more impressive, to me, but it's still pretty entertaining to watch someone just completely destroy one of those super-hard games that used to piss me off.